Eben Moglen

Eben Moglen is a professor of law and history of law at Columbia University, and serves pro bono as General Counsel for Free Software Foundation. He is noteworthy for co-writing the GNU licenses with Richard Stallman. The most famous of these licenses is the GNU General Public License.

Moglen received his bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College in 1980, where he won the Hicks Prize for Literary Criticism. In 1985, he received a master's degree in philosophy and a JD from Yale University.

Moglen was a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall (1986-87 term).

He received a PhD in history from Yale University in 1993.

Moglen serves as a director of Public Patent Foundation.

His opinion on free software is that it's a fundamental requirement for a democratic and free society in which we are surrounded by and depending on technical devices. Only if controlling these devices is open to all via free software, power can be balanced equally.

Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law is the idea that the Internet works like induction on the humans minds of the planet. Hence Moglen's phrase "Resist the resistance!".

In 2003 he received the EFF Pioneer Award.

Quotes

The great moral question of the twenty-first century is this: if all knowing, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?

Publications